Primal Groudon and Mega Salamence in Ubers - Concerns from SPL

Hello, I'm here to discuss whether some re-tiering in ORAS Ubers should be done or not, being more specific, re-tiering Primal Groudon and Mega Salamence. The current ORAS Ubers metagame has lasted for almost 5 months now and these two pokemon have proven to be unbalanced or extremely centralizing.

Statistics suggest that Primal Groudon and Mega Salamence are on almost every single team. This irks me as they restrict teambuilding so much, to the point where there are ~2 acceptable builds overall in ORAS Ubers. You normally focus too much on checking them as they require very specific checks, which leaves you weaker to everything else in the tier.

There are some very important points which chaos posted in the thread regarding the Mega Rayquaza ban that I think they support the cause:

It is no fun to play or watch matches with this Pokemon/ability/etc (henceforth just Pokemon) allowed. Having this Pokemon in Ubers makes me want to play some other meta. I would be bored as fuck to watch a match with this Pokemon allowed. This is a subjective criterion, but an important one I think: if everyone hates Ubers, then why have it? It is our obligation in such a case to try to fix it.
I feel like Mega Salamence and Primal Groudon fit in this quite well, since they are in the majority of the teams I can guess why people consider Ubers boring to watch, spectating games with the same pokemon over and over can get pretty boring. Often I hear the acusations of ORAS Ubers being "complete aids" because Primal Groudon and Mega Salamence just appear like very unbalanced Pokemon in front of them due to the amount of battles that they win and the huge impact they have in the metagame.

This Pokemon is ~unreasonably~ centralizing. Think 70%+ usage. Even Xerneas was (I think) ~45% usage.
Supporting the previous arguement, the usage statistics show that Prmal Groudon had a 68% usage throughout the whole SPL, meaning that it is a extremely overcentralizng pokemon and it is in the majority of the teams. While Salmence isn't even close that porcentage it showed many times that the battle may be decided on which Mega Salamence set the player is carrying. I can show you guys a very solid example of that, as found here. I was in control the whole game, I played it like I should have. You may think I should have stayed in on the Salamence but I needed to keep Arceus healthy for his Extremekiller Arceus so I made the safest play and sac'd Ho-Oh as I wouldn't need it to win. Had he used the Double Edge Dragon Dance set I would have won that game, however, he used the one Salamence set I was weak to. Mega Salamence doesn't restrict teambuilding any less than Primal Groudon, its only 2 counters are Lugia and Arceus-Rock, which they either require a lot of support for them to be worth on a team or the oppurtinity cost is too high, "Why would I use Arceus-Rock when I can use Extremekiller Arceus with Stone Edge or Arceus-Ground to check Primal Groudon?".

I'm mostly concerned about how ORAS Ubers was in SPL, when you compare it to SPL 5 (where XY Ubers developed for the most part from it), it showed that ORAS Ubers had almost no room for innovation or just tier exploration in general because those two pokemon overcentralize a little too much. I don't know how you guys feel about this but for me, every ORAS Ubers game was really boring to watch.

Thanks for your time, I know this might be an abrupt way to bringing it up but I think it is strictly necessary as Ubers has a spot in Official Tournaments. I expect you to be open minded and have a civilized discussion.
 

Fireburn

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Hopefully this can be a more two-sided discussion instead of just "let's burn the witch." I was going to bring this up eventually, admittedly not as timely as I had hoped because of...well, life, but here we are.

Look, I’ve been peppered with many requests to ban Primal Groudon and/or Mega Salamence, but it is difficult for me to justify doing so a la Mega Rayquaza, which I’m sure many people would like me to do, as regardless of how crazy their stats/abilities are, what matters is playing with and against them, both Pokemon still have defined checks. No true counters mind you, but both Primal Groudon and Mega Salamence have multiple checks that are perfectly good and viable Pokemon in the Ubers metagame (Mence arguably less so but they exist, it certainly has more than two: Dialga/Tyranitar/Klefki/PDef Arceus-Water/bulky Mence/Skarmory/not letting it set up which isn't as hard as it seems), and most Uber Pokemon have ways to overcome their supposed "counters." Compare that to Mega Rayquaza who basically had...nothing really. There's a lot more gray area here.

And I get that Primal Groudon is getting usage that could be considered unreasonable. Any Pokemon almost hitting 70% usage in any tier is something that hasn't been seen since the RBY/GSC days. That doesn't mean Primal Groudon is unstoppable, however. Just that's it is very easy to splash onto teams because of its ability to compress an incredible amount of roles (SR, Kyogre check, Xerneas check, Electric check, Steel check, fat phazer) into one slot.

I understand everyone has complaints about any particular metagame. That’s natural. And I've been seeing quite a lot of complaints about the ORAS Ubers metagame from people at every level - regular ladderers, Ubers SPL players, teammates of Ubers SPL players who remarked "sorry you had to play such a stupid meta lol" in shoutout posts, you name it. And I know that the "easy way out" is to just ban them, but at the end of the day the argument boils down to "I think this metagame is stale/not fun" which I am not comfortable using as the sole reason to ban something from Ubers.

Not to say I'm making light of chaos's proposed criteria, and I'm well aware of how subjective tiering can be sometimes, but it still behooves us to try and set the clearest boundaries we can before considering bans, especially from Ubers. Because at the end of the day, Ubers has always been a metagame centered around hazard control and a top 3-5 group of mons you would expect to find on most teams. Except for the rich getting richer, this hasn't really changed in ORAS.


I think that before anything can be done with the metagame or any potential ~fixes~, we must first answer the question of “where do we draw the line?” Generally, Ubers follows a different tiering philosophy in that it attempts to preserve a minimalist number of bans, and it doesn't explicitly ban for balance. I know that Edgar is saying they (Pdon/Mence) make the metagame imbalanced, but Ubers has never banned for balance, only to preserve playability as was what happened with Mega Rayquaza. If Ubers were to start banning to “balance” the metagame, and it could somehow reach an equilibrium state where Ubers was balanced without banning all the “Uber” Pokemon (as per famous slippery slope arguments), where does that leave OU, the fundamental balanced tier? And an imbalanced Ubers metagame does not imply an unenjoyable Ubers metagame (see: DPP Ubers and its lead matchup/what the heck switches into Palkia + other Dragons woes). What "balanced" Ubers metagames we had in the past was largely due to a happy coincidence, not because Ubers actively tried to balance itself.

Though lack of enjoyment of the metagame from what appears to be a significant portion of the playerbase is definitely concerning, as it should be, banning something from Ubers because the metagame is “unfun” is a horribly subjective heuristic, and if the questionable elements aren’t obviously busted, we could simply tell those complaining to stuff it and go play OU/UU/NU/RU/LC/Doubles/VGC/Battle Spot/etc. instead. Sounds harsh, I know, but that's what we did back in the DPP and BW days.

That being said, the banning of Mega Rayquaza/the creation of Anything Goes/declaring Ubers an ~official tier~ have blurred this line somewhat, and admittedly has left me a bit unsure on how to address these complaints about ”fun”. The “offending” elements of the current ORAS Ubers metagame aren’t on the level of Mega “OHKO the metagame unboosted” Rayquaza, which thus far is the only concrete example of a Pokemon that actually is too ridiculous for Ubers. At the same time, Ubers is a tier that is played in tournaments for trophies, and no longer just a banlist, which makes adhering to the “take it or leave it” approach less of an obvious course of action (though still one that is available).

Overall, there is significant gray area as to whether action should be taken, if at all.

So I guess what I am after is this: where do we draw the line? To what extent should Ubers balance the "minimalist ban" philosophy with the "preserve a competitive metagame" idea? Does something actually need to be done? This shouldn't be a "lets ban pdon/mmence" discussion (no offense Edgar but your OP heavily implies you want them banned) so much as it should be "where should ubers draw the line" discussion, since Ubers doesn't work like the other tiers. Note that this doesn't necessarily mean "how much 'balancing' is acceptable" - thinking more like "what is the upper limit of our tolerance range."

Going to include some summarized thoughts from Jibaku, as he was heavily involved in Ubers policy discussion with me in the past, played in SPL, and I was discussing PDon/MMence with him way before this thread became a concept in case you were scared I leaked to someone without access:

Jibaku said:
- Stats mean jack. What matters is playing with and against them. Groudon just happens to be super splashable, but that doesn't mean you can't deal with it. At the same time, it's not impossible to make pdonless teams, as dice has been able to pull off several times. Hard, but reasonably doable.
- Honestly speaking spl made me believe that they're more balanced than I'd have imagined. Primal Groudon, for example, really only boiled down to very few sets.
- Requiring 2 checks for some mons is not a new concept. See Palkia in DPP. Now name a good answer to that Pokemon (OH WAIT FARCEUS IS BANNED LOL)
- I'm a firm believer of not setting a balance standard for Ubers, but instead setting a power cap at the absolute edge of competitiveness (tm). I'd also like an identity for Ubers that's distinct from the other tiers, as it's a metagame formed by banned Pokemon.
- Snowballing concerns: I brought this up with the creation of AG, but a move like this can lead to a trickle of bans. What's next? Geomancy? Shadow Tag? Kyogre?
That's about all I have to say for now. Apologies if its kind of rambly, just wanted to get thoughts on paper. Please share any and all thoughts, I'm all ears.

Tagging chaos since he wanted to keep tabs on Ubers stuff.
 

shrang

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One thing to note, is that the major premise of this thread is that Primal Groudon and Mega Salamence overcentralises the metagame. While this may be one criterion for banning things in other metagames, in Ubers, we'll have to think about it again. Since Edgar's OP quoted chaos' thread after the Mega Ray ban, I shall do the same here. Just to say, I'm not going to defend ORAS Ubers in the slightest here, it's a pretty shitty metagame, but let's not be rash here.

Here are the "warning signs" in that thread again:

  • This Pokemon/ability/etc unreasonably raises the volatility of Ubers. Think Moody or OHKO spam.
  • This Pokemon is ~unreasonably~ centralizing. Think 70%+ usage. Even Xerneas was (I think) ~45% usage.
  • Related to the above point: This Pokemon is obviously in a different power bracket than most of the other Ubers. I argued earlier that M-Ray was in a different power bracket because it is the first ~800 BST Pokemon with a useful ability and unrestricted item.
  • It is no fun to play or watch matches with this Pokemon/ability/etc (henceforth just Pokemon) allowed. Having this Pokemon in Ubers makes me want to play some other meta. I would be bored as fuck to watch a match with this Pokemon allowed. This is a subjective criterion, but an important one I think: if everyone hates Ubers, then why have it? It is our obligation in such a case to try to fix it.
In the OP, two of these points were addressed, namely the "unreasonably centralising" and the "no fun" aspects. In terms of the "overcentralising" sign, we can see from the usage stats that the OP quoted that Groudon is pretty much on the cusp of 70%+ usage (although it's not there yet!), but Mega Salamence isn't anywhere near 70% (38% according to the SPL stats). I do agree that ORAS Ubers is a pretty "not fun" metagame, though (important to note the subjectivity of this), but can we actually pin the quality of the metagame on these two Pokemon? Maybe, maybe not.

Let us just assume that Groudon satisfies the "unreasonably centralising" criteria (I don't think Mence does just by usage stats alone) and both of them without a doubt make the metagame unfun. This still doesn't address the other two criteria. Let's try not to overlook chaos' other points, please. Personally, I think Mence does raise the volatility of Ubers a fair bit, but I don't think it unreasonably does it. Chaos provided his explanation of volatility here, but I'd personally just prefer to think of it in terms of stability. Does Primal Groudon and Mega Mence make the metagame unreasonably unstable? Personally I think the opposite is true. The metagame, with all of its flaws, being stale and boring, is still very stable. It's nothing like what we had when we banned Mega Ray (when Mega Ray had literally no stops to it). Even though Groudon has near 70% usage, does it really put the metagame on its knees even attempting to stop it? Not really. It's just really splashable. If anything, it checks so many threats that it kind of stabilises the metagame in a way, allowing you to divert teamslots to other things, even though it rendered half of the Ubers metagame useless. Mence, on the other hand, is a bit different. It's more of an offensive Pokemon (although defensive is still fantastic). However, I still don't see Mence flipping the metagame upside down just trying to counter it. It's still very stoppable, nothing like what we had when Mega Ray was around. So yeah, so what you want about the metagame - stale, boring, overcentralised, aids, whatever - I don't think you can call it unstable/volatile.

Now, this leads onto the other criteria we had, which was "power level". Are Groudon and Mence really so powerful they are in a different power bracket from the rest of Ubers? I really don't think so. Sure, in terms of utility, Groudon is WAAAAAY more splashable than most Ubers (and Mence somewhat more), but I don't think this is a "power" difference. They still have approximately the same "stats" as all their other Ubers brethren, namely ~700BST or ~800BST with restrictions, like how chaos outlined in his thread on Mega Ray and AG.

There's also another sentiment that I've seen brought up in discussions regarding banning these Pokemon in Ubers, and that's the "you can't prepare for everything in Ubers" and being "match-up reliant". Ironically, it's almost the opposite of what was brought up in the OP. I'd like to address this argument if someone brings it up, but I'm really busy and I don't really want to spend extra time pre-empting discussion, so I'll just leave it here now. If someone brings it up, I'll probably address it.

Also, just wondering, can we also bring this to the general Ubers forum as well? I can understand we'd probably want to have some closed-door discussion on the direction we want to go, but seeing how the S-tag fiasco turned out, there was an issue about how non-transparent Ubers policy was. There were people who were quite disappointed to find out that the whole Mega Ray ban was held under closed doors rather than given to the community. I do realise that we'd get a stack of shitposts in what we normally would call a Mega-thread, but that's something that's unavoidable, and I'd much rather the community voice their concerns.
 
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I have little to add to what Fireburn posted, except to say that I personally despised playing in SPL this year because of what Primal Groudon and Mega Salamence turned the tier into. There's no question that a metagame's enjoyability is subjective. However, I spoke to people who played in SPL about the Ubers metagame and almost everyone disliked it. I do think it matters -- a lot -- that players at the highest level dislike the metagame, and having spoken to BKC and Dice I know that they dislike it too.

With that said, Primal Groudon and Mega Salamence are nowhere near as broken as Mega Rayquaza was (although Mence + Wobb is still really broken). For me, Ubers tiering philosophy is going to be critical in determining what we do. Does Ubers become more trigger-happy just because Anything Goes now exists & Ubers is an official tier? Or do we stick to the mentality Ubers used to have except in extreme cases ala Mega Rayquaza? I'm not opposed to the banning of either Mega Salamence or Primal Groudon at the moment, but am opposed to falling down a slippery slope where we ban more borderline cases.
 
Just saying, this stuff is a rabbit hole. Mence and Pdon are just the details of the overall problem which is increased team matchup from strained teambuilding. Keep in mind that these mons also check other mons, there's a very large possibility that ubers problems won't stop there and that primal Kyogre, for example, or other Pokemon will rise up as new issues that are breaking the metagame.

What is essentially being proposed here is shifting Ubers philosophy to one centered around making the metagame enjoyable rather than simply playable. afaik, this is essentially the philosphy behind OU. Ignoring all the potential problems with discerning what seperates the two metagames, you run into the issue that even OU (with the x amount of time since ORAS's release) has yet to realize their ideal of an enjoyable metagame and that they are being plagued by essentially the same problems here.

Also, keep in mind there are people, like Jibaku, that actually enjoy this metagame.

Honestly, I don't think banning is the only solution to this problem.


All that said, I don't give two shits about the ORAS ubers metagame. I'm posting simply to give that extra insight. I'm not going to oppose or support either side regarding a metagame I don't play and will not play.
 
Let me just say that ORAS Ubers is one of my least favourite metagames I've played, which really is too bad since I somewhat liked XY Ubers. Oh I still remember discussing Primal Groudon with Hack and thinking it would make a good addition to the meta since it gave us another Xerneas check...

My thoughts on the aforementioned warning signs:
  • This Pokemon/ability/etc unreasonably raises the volatility of Ubers. Think Moody or OHKO spam.
    This is something where I think a ban of Primal Groudon might be hard to justify. It's not overcentralizing in the same way Rayquaza is, I mean he's the best Pokémon in the meta but it doesn't necessarily win you the game if you give it 1 free turn. I think the key point here is if you consider teambuilding to part of the game or not. If you don't, you might even say that it lowers the volatility. This would be because if every player uses the same team, the better player is more likely to win than usual because matchup is not a factor. However if you do consider teambuilding part of the game then it is probably the case, since it gives you less options in teambuilding.
  • This Pokemon is ~unreasonably~ centralizing. Think 70%+ usage. Even Xerneas was (I think) ~45% usage.

    Yes this is pretty much the case. It is under 70% just barely in SPL but if you look at the statistics per week, the latter weeks are higher than the earlier ones. Week 6: 80%, Week 7: 70%, Week 8: 90%!, Week 9: 63%, Semis: 75%, Finals: 100%.
  • Related to the above point: This Pokemon is obviously in a different power bracket than most of the other Ubers. I argued earlier that M-Ray was in a different power bracket because it is the first ~800 BST Pokemon with a useful ability and unrestricted item.

    This is hard to say, Primal Groudon does have an incredibly high BST (770) but to be fair so does Primal Kyogre and I don't think anyone thinks it's as troublesome. I think this is up to whether you consider ultimate splashability to be very powerful. (Or: Primal Groudon can pretty much be splashed on any team and it will be at least really good. You could say that makes it a different power level, but that is arguable.)
  • It is no fun to play or watch matches with this Pokemon/ability/etc (henceforth just Pokemon) allowed. Having this Pokemon in Ubers makes me want to play some other meta. I would be bored as fuck to watch a match with this Pokemon allowed. This is a subjective criterion, but an important one I think: if everyone hates Ubers, then why have it? It is our obligation in such a case to try to fix it.

    This is entirely subjective, but speaking from personal experience: Definitely. What is described here is 100% true for me. I haven't played Gen 6 Ubers in a while and I really don't want to anymore either. I've been looking into lower tiers as an alternative lately like described. Honestly, I'm not interested in Ubers anymore when in XY it used to be my most-played tier.
Just my thoughts on the individual points, I'm not sure if I feel Primal Groudon should be banned or not, banning in Ubers to me is pretty complicated. It would make me interested in Ubers again though.
 
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JabbaTheGriffin

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I think that the "near 70%" usage should be the first hurdle that needs to be crossed in these situations and then the discussion moves from there. For that reason I don't think Mega Mence is something that should even be on the table at this point (not to rule it out in the future).

Then I think the discussion really goes towards what the Pokemon does in the metagame. Does its presence just make matches unplayable? Having played a fair share of oras ubers, I'd say Pdon's presences is more of a ADV Swampert situation. It's just a good plug-in Pokemon that serves a lot of (mostly defensive) roles. Its most offensive set is pretty solid, but nothing worse than the tier currently has.

I really think at the end of the day, if there's any real question about whether something breaks Ubers, then it really shouldn't even be an issue. And in any tiering-related vote structures that are implemented in the future, I'd love to see Ubers require something ridiculous like 90% to ban.

(i think this is a reiteration of some posts already made)
 
Not really gonna argue much but when Deo-S/Darkrai/Pdon/Mence/Xern/Ekiller has proven to be the most consistent tournament team, you know something is wrong with the tier.

It is pretty much impossible for any team built with a balanced mindset to handle the pressure the combination of double dance Groudon+dd Mence, and if you ride out that storm you are still going to die to Ekiller.

Possibly it is Mence and Pdon who stand for the most broken elements in the tier, but MM2 is correct in saying that the problem comes from mons in a "competitive" setting with an expanding amount of threats with the same limited team/moveslots and whatnot. I don't play this tier much and I intend to never play it seriously ever again so take from my opinion whatever you will since tiers should imo be formed and evaluated by the active players, not by some old geezers like me.

ps. don't compare mence to dpp palkia, there is this thing called revenge killing that mega mence invalidates

edit: A decent idea would be giving ubers a "no mega mence or pdon"-ladder to see how things develop from there. It has to be pointed out that we don't actually know if the meta will be better- my thoughts especially go to ho-oh+msab teams- so it's better to get some smoother transition with more people involved in the process. Also UU got a no scald ladder so it's really not a controversial thing to give ubers and extra ladder (you could argue ubers already "got" AG but that metagame should be as far from any competitive meta as possible so it's not really an ubers thing for me).
 
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Fireburn

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Been thinking about this more since the issue has come up again recently.

Theorymon had the idea of creating an "Ubers Seasonal" ladder. Since Ubers tends to be a rather static metagame when it comes to tiering as things don't really (and shouldn't) get banned unless they make the metagame unplayable, we think having a sandbox-like environment to just tinker around with the metagame might be an interesting idea to drum up some activity and look at potential metagame alterations in a harmless large-scale environment. The concept would be similar to the "no Megas" and "no Scald" ladders that have appeared recently, but would change every so often to introduce a new twist (stuff like readding perma-weather, banning all S and A rank mons in viability thread, UUbers, etc). We need more time to develop the idea, but we could throw "no Primals" on our docket first since even if we're probably not gonna ban them, it wouldn't hurt to get a look-see at a metagame without them.

This ladder would in no way be used for tiering decisions though. Dumping it here to see if people think this would be a good thing or not.
 

aim

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I honestly don't think this is the place to post about that since you said yourself "This ladder would in no way be used for tiering decisions..." and this topic was for stuff that actually affects the tier, as placement in a major tournament is a big deal. That being said you are the tier leader and if you want to make a ladder like that, go for it.
 
I can agree with aim here, but I do like the idea of "Ubers Seasonal". How about instead of ladder with a changed tier, Live Tours similar to the OU Live Suspect Tours?
 

Aberforth

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Just going to preface this post with a couple of things. 1) I dont know if it's proper etiquette to post in a thread this old, but I did ask a couple of the people who had posted in this thread, and they didn't mind if I replied to it and 2) I will only be focusing on Primal Groudon in this post, as I believe it is a much more serious problem with ORAS ubers than Salamence is.

Primal Groudon is the biggest problem in ubers at the moment, I dont really think that there can be a doubt about that. I'm not saying that there aren't other problems with the tier, but Primal Groudon is definitely the biggest. Looking at the usage stats for 1760 from May, we can see this:

1 | Groudon | 73.96634%

For one thing, I consider that low. For another, there hasn't been a Pokemon that has received that much usage in official tiers since Snorlax in GSC, and I would consider that a problem right off of the bat. In OU, Aegislash was deemed overcentralising with approximately 50% usage, and Primal Groudon is very much the Ubers version of Aegislash. In the transition from XY Ubers to ORAS ubers, there were 6 relevant new things introduced that still effect the ubers metagame. Primal Groudon, Primal Kyogre, Lati@s, Mega-Salamence, Mega-Sableye and Mega-Diancie. With these 6 additions (7 if you treat the latis as different mons, but their purpose in ubers is essentially the same as each others'), in a balanced metagame, you would expect a similar or slightly higher number of viable pokemon. However, as can be seen when comparing the two viability rankings (XY and ORAS), the number of viable Pokemon has decreased quite noticibly, going from 85 viable mons in XY to 76 in ORAS, a decrease of slightly over 10%. Considering 7 new pokemon that have gone on to the viability rankings, the number of Pokemon that were considered viabile in X and Y that are now considered unviable is 16, nearly 20% of the previous metagame. While this could be attributed to multiple roles being fulfilled by the newer arrivals, Primal Groudon is the key point to the majority of mons that have changed in viabilty, some examples include Mega-Scizor (from A- to B-), Landorus-T (A+ to Unranked), Kyogre (S to C), Palkia (A+ to B), Arceus Electric (A- to C+), Arceus Poision (A- to C+), Gliscor (A- to Unranked), Gothitelle (A- to Unranked), and that is only focusing on the significant changes from the A-ranks. My point is not that these mons all deserve a place on the viability rankings, and Primal Groudon should go as a result of that, but simply pointing out that Primal Groudon centralises the metagame around itself more than any Pokemon Prior to it in ubers since, in all likelihood, Mewtwo back in the first generation. This hypercentralised state is poor for the metagame, and restricts creativity and enjoyment of the tier by many, and leads to a non-evolving metagame that results in it being stale and not something worth the effort or time to play.

In previous generations, the response to this would have been 'if you dont like it, leave', as in ubers we didn't ban anything not absolutely necessary (ie Moody). However, since ORAS was released and Mega-Rayquaza was banned, this approach is outdated and should not be looked to to be the ideal model. We have now set precedent, banning things in ubers should no longer be a taboo. These were the guidelines Chaos set for future bans in ubers:

  • This Pokemon/ability/etc unreasonably raises the volatility of Ubers. Think Moody or OHKO spam.
  • This Pokemon is ~unreasonably~ centralizing. Think 70%+ usage. Even Xerneas was (I think) ~45% usage.
  • Related to the above point: This Pokemon is obviously in a different power bracket than most of the other Ubers. I argued earlier that M-Ray was in a different power bracket because it is the first ~800 BST Pokemon with a useful ability and unrestricted item.
  • It is no fun to play or watch matches with this Pokemon/ability/etc (henceforth just Pokemon) allowed. Having this Pokemon in Ubers makes me want to play some other meta. I would be bored as fuck to watch a match with this Pokemon allowed. This is a subjective criterion, but an important one I think: if everyone hates Ubers, then why have it? It is our obligation in such a case to try to fix it.
  • This Pokemon/ability/etc unreasonably raises the volatility of Ubers. Think Moody or OHKO spam.
Debatable, I would argue yes as frequently games are decided on what Primal Groudon set you are running and how it fares vs your opposition, but that is entirely debatable and not the focus of this post.
  • This Pokemon is ~unreasonably~ centralizing. Think 70%+ usage. Even Xerneas was (I think) ~45% usage.
1 | Groudon | 73.96634%
Yeah, Groudon is unreasonably centralizing. I dont think there could be any argument here.
  • Related to the above point: This Pokemon is obviously in a different power bracket than most of the other Ubers. I argued earlier that M-Ray was in a different power bracket because it is the first ~800 BST Pokemon with a useful ability and unrestricted item.

Now this is a big one, and one I wish to focus on, as it seems my opinion on this part is relatively uncommon, and I cannot see why. When you have a pokemon that hits as hard physically as Rayquaza, as hard specially as previous-generations Kyogre, in one EV spread being capable of checking the most threatening pokemon in ubers either physically or specially in the form of Xerneas and Salamence and Arceus-Normal, AFTER ANY OF THEM HAVE SET UP living any hit and being able to phaze, cripple or kill any of them, with one EV spread wit EVs to spare, I consider this on a power level completely different to any other uber mon. And while it is true it cannot hit as hard specially as Kyogre, Physically as Rayquaza while checking them all in one EV spread, it can choose to do any two of the three. It also has a fantatic typing and ability, giving it only one weakness.
  • It is no fun to play or watch matches with this Pokemon/ability/etc (henceforth just Pokemon) allowed. Having this Pokemon in Ubers makes me want to play some other meta. I would be bored as fuck to watch a match with this Pokemon allowed. This is a subjective criterion, but an important one I think: if everyone hates Ubers, then why have it? It is our obligation in such a case to try to fix it.
This is the case for myself and many others, including those who do not play ubers. Anecdotally, I went into the RU room one day and was recognised as a moderator in the ubers room, at which point a roomauth in there said that he had tried ORAS ubers, but it was too bad a metagame for him to play. The state of the metagame is driving away not only respected ubers players who hate the metagame (look up in this thread for some examples), but also other players that would otherwise be contributing to the state of ubers. While the opinion of one RU room driver shouldn't mean much to the tiering of Ubers, the fact that people who are recognised good contributors and good presences in the community will not join the ubers community due to how bad the metagame is, it should set off warning bells at the very least.

Primal Groudon checks so many things that would otherwise be viable, and in doing so stops the tier from growing. I can think of a dozen or so Xerneas checks that aren't used at the moment because they are essentially a free switch into Primal Groudon, and that's not to mention the myriad of other things that would become more viable. More freedom in teambuilding should be the goal of most metagames, to promote creativity and ensure that the better player will win most frequently. I reject the thesis that Primal Groudon is self balancing, and the one who uses it better is the one who is the more skilled player, as often the match can come down to how well your Primal Groudon set in particular matches up with your opponent's team. If you make a team that completely handles the Double Dance Primal Groudon set, you can have no chance vs the Rock Polish mixed set, and the twave rocks set might be able to deal with most of your team. The only combination that can deal with all variants of Primal Groudon is Lugia + Arceus-Water (which can still lose to the twave SD groudon set depending on paralysis, but oh well) and the two of them are tough to fit onto most teams without causing a glaring weakness to other very common pokemon such as Darkrai. The sheer presence of Groudon enhances the matchup factor in the tier to an unreasonable degree and I believe that it should be banned as a cumulation of these reasons. In my opinion, it meets all of the criteria that chaos set for the banning of something from ubers, and it only stifles the tier's growth into who can come up with the most surprising groudon set. That is not something we should aim for.

There has been talk of a No-Primal Groudon ladder, and I would love to see it put in place so as to see firsthand what the metagame would be like without this pokemon making the tier terrible to play, but I dont feel like we should ignore the issue until said ladder is put into place. To do so prolong's the tiers suffering and fails to address the cause of the issues facing ubers.
 
this is simply an argument of a paradigm shift. primal groudon is inarguably the focal point of the volatile atmosphere in the metagame. its unprecedented presence and flexibility cause the metagame revolve this pokemon which, unlike in the stable hypercentralized metgames of bw2 ubers and gsc ou, lacks definite counterplay. as opposed to snorlax or kyogre's best sets in their respective metagames which have counterplay, groudon's ability to cheese past any and all checks and counters with two perfectly viable status options make the metagame far more imbalanced than in the previous metagames mentioned. furthermore, this hasn't been mentioned already, but primal groudon vs primal groudon sr wars are hella dumb and just cause even more issues manifesting the problems it causes.

the metagame is balanced to a certain extent evidenced by the fact that viable, somewhat consistent (loosely used........) teams have been created. however, the metagame is certainly far from ideal and lacks the competitiveness that ubers has inherently had in the past (luck?). if we wish to maintain the current paradigm of ban list first, tier second, then the status quo is ideal, but is this truly what we want in a tournament metagame: a tier that could be improved upon but isn't due to restrictions based on definition?

e: this post kinda made it seem like i meant hypercentralization is bad. it's not.
 

Haruno

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Alright, seeing as how you need a badge to post here and Lord Outrage is ICBB, he's unable to post but after some discussion through private messaging, he made some rather valid points and sums it up below on why Pdon is a necessary evil in the ubers metagame and I feel that his rebuttals to pomman's arguments are worth discussing since pomman did bring up some questionable points.

PoMMan your post is subjective and your reasoning is flawed for the following reasons:
1)Comparing OU to Ubers(Primal Don in Ubers to Aegislash in OU) doesn't make sense. Yes ubers became a tier lately but it's still quiet far from OU in terms of tiering policy.
2)Comparing the viability rankings and the usage stats from 2 different generations like ORAS and XY doesn't make sense. These are things that varies sometimes a lot with just 1 Pokemon addition to the tier while more than 7 viable pokemons were added from XY to ORAS. So bringing this ain't helping your argument.
3)"I can think of a dozen or so Xerneas checks that aren't used at the moment because they are essentially a free switch into Primal Groudon" 12? are you sure you are not exaggerating here? ok Scizor? Mega Mawile? Amoonguss ? what else Venusaur? those Pokemons are poor in ubers with Primal Groudon or without it and make the user of one of those suffer from very high opportunity cost, in addition to the fact that in xy where pdon was unavailable, xern checks tend to equate to ho-oh bait who is also a dominating force in the metagame. You're mostly trying to unjustly put the blame solely on primal groudon for xern checks viability dropping to shit when that is simply not the case.
4)Banning Don is NOT SOLVING AT ALL the mach-up issue, an issue every tier suffers from. Without Don mach-up will still have the same impact on the game if NOT MORE, Mainly because don checks a lot of things in 1 team slot and if it's not here you will need more slots to check things like Xerneas and Ogre and also the new Mons that become viable after its ban. Pdon simply compresses far too many things into one teamslot and limits the amount of viable ubers which if anything is better for the metagame issue since you'll have less things to check in addition to needing less mons to do it. ATM you'll only need one slot to check like palkia/scizor/ho oh/ekiller/mence/xern/kyogre/waterceus/grasseus/etc whereas without pdon a good amount of threats become more usable and you'll have more things to deal with and less teamslots for doing so although you'll have more viable options, you'll be forced to use multiple teamslots to do what pdon does in one. Not to mention that if this thread was created solely for the matchup being especially retarded in ubers, I don't see how removing pdon would fix this.
5)There might be a problem in Oras ubers and banning don may not solve it at all. Its ban might actually lead to a series of other Pokemons being broken(Xerneas,Primal Ogre for example) and may just lead to even more problems in the tier and although this is a slippery slope, it is something you must keep in mind especially when it comes to PR since you haven't given any evidence to show that removing pdon will actually help the tier. Your idea of ladder is cute though and would be useful in theory but ultimately it'd be like the no scald ladder or the ou no mega where the upper end players won't play it since there's really no motivation to.

Now I would like to give my own opinion on mence and don but specially on don:
1)Oras Ubers with primal Groudon and MMence is a tier where all styles are viable. From hard Stall to hard HO everything is viable and usable with solid teams. Unlike when Mega Rayquaza was around: Balance and stall were totally unviable so please no comparisons.
2)Primal Don Helps all play styles equally. You can use it on stall,balance,BO,HO it will always help you equally.
3)Primal Don has lots of checks that are viable and that serve as checks for other pokemons too.
Example: Latias checks don and ogre and can defog, Giratina O checks groudon and ekiller + Fighting mons and can also defog, Lugia checks both mence and Don etc...
4)Primal Don lacks any sort of recovery(neither lefties nor recover roost etc) if you land in a toxic on it, it just sinks like the titanic so you could use toxic on ogre for example(helpful vs lati twins 2) and on mons that lures it in usually.
The lack of recovery is a major problem it struggles from, people just need to step up their building a bit instead of complaining all the time. Instead of seeing it as a monster and being stubborn just find ways around it and hit its weak spots.
5)As I said earlier, Primal Groudon is a soft check to a lot of things. Banning it will make the tier even more mach-up based and even more problems will arise. You will need more team slots to check xerneas and ogre as well the new pokemons that become viable after it's ban so It's ban is really solving nothing.

Yes primal don is great at what it does. It's good offensively and defensively and puts on rocks reliably. I agree, but it's noway near the juggernaut some players are making it look like and it has many weak spots that a player can exploit while teambuilding and during the game.
 

Starmei

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Yes primal don is great at what it does. It's good offensively and defensively and puts on rocks reliably. I agree, but it's noway near the juggernaut some players are making it look like and it has many weak spots that a player can exploit while teambuilding and during the game.
Much of this ^

Just putting forward my view real quick - People say that these mons (Primal Dondons and MMence) stop/limit creativity but no, I disagree. They make it slightly more difficult to be creative but honestly it's just lazy building and people's attitudes. There is plenty of room for creativity in ORAS Ubers, but quite a few people just refuse to do anything and stick to using the same shit over and over.

The Outrage: people are not creative
The Outrage: not the tier
Couldn't agree more with this

 
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Aberforth

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Alright, seeing as how you need a badge to post here and Lord Outrage is ICBB, he's unable to post but after some discussion through private messaging, he made some rather valid points and sums it up below on why Pdon is a necessary evil in the ubers metagame and I feel that his rebuttals to pomman's arguments are worth discussing since pomman did bring up some questionable points.

PoMMan your post is subjective and your reasoning is flawed for the following reasons:
1)Comparing OU to Ubers(Primal Don in Ubers to Aegislash in OU) doesn't make sense. Yes ubers became a tier lately but it's still quiet far from OU in terms of tiering policy.
I was citing that as a reference point to explain its situation in terms of something that people who might read this who dont play ubers might better understand. For another, why shouldn't an OU mindset be applied to current ubers aside from the fact that we didn't do so in previous generations when no pokemon had ever been banned from ubers.

2)Comparing the viability rankings and the usage stats from 2 different generations like ORAS and XY doesn't make sense. These are things that varies sometimes a lot with just 1 Pokemon addition to the tier while more than 7 viable pokemons were added from XY to ORAS. So bringing this ain't helping your argument.
For all the things I mentioned, basically the only thing that caused such a huge drop in viability for them was the introduction of Primal Groudon, with only 7 new introductions in terms of mons that would have an effect on a prospective pokemon's viability, either directly or as a result of the metagame they directly create and influence. Not only did the raw number of things considered viable decrease by a fairly significant amount, the things that stayed viable became significantly less good as a result of it existing, with almost everything of high viability being dependant on being able to hinder Primal Groudon if it was to choose to switch in, with the notable exception of Xerneas.

3)"I can think of a dozen or so Xerneas checks that aren't used at the moment because they are essentially a free switch into Primal Groudon" 12? are you sure you are not exaggerating here? ok Scizor? Mega Mawile? Amoonguss ? what else Venusaur? those Pokemons are poor in ubers with Primal Groudon or without it and make the user of one of those suffer from very high opportunity cost, in addition to the fact that in xy where pdon was unavailable, xern checks tend to equate to ho-oh bait who is also a dominating force in the metagame. You're mostly trying to unjustly put the blame solely on primal groudon for xern checks viability dropping to shit when that is simply not the case.
Adressing the second half first, being ho-oh bait is not nearly as bad as being Primal Groudon bait due to the larger number of available counterplay options there are in dealing with ho-oh, most notably, Stealth Rock. Primal Groudon is the only new addition that directly had an effect on most of the xerneas checks I am referring to, with the possible exception of Diancie as it has made Ho-oh slightly more popular.

Addressing the first half of that, Scizor (mega and non), Aegislash (turns out people think this has stayed equally viable), Mawile, Amoongus, Poison-Arceus, Thundurus, Lucario (in fairness, this is more the fault of Salamence), Victini, Bronzong. A dozen was a slight exaggeration, but 8 (9 including Aegi, which I considered having gotten worse with ORAS) Xerneas checks got significantly worse simply due to the existance of Primal Groudon.

4)Banning Don is NOT SOLVING AT ALL the mach-up issue, an issue every tier suffers from. Without Don mach-up will still have the same impact on the game if NOT MORE, Mainly because don checks a lot of things in 1 team slot and if it's not here you will need more slots to check things like Xerneas and Ogre and also the new Mons that become viable after its ban. Pdon simply compresses far too many things into one teamslot and limits the amount of viable ubers which if anything is better for the metagame issue since you'll have less things to check in addition to needing less mons to do it. ATM you'll only need one slot to check like palkia/scizor/ho oh/ekiller/mence/xern/kyogre/waterceus/grasseus/etc whereas without pdon a good amount of threats become more usable and you'll have more things to deal with and less teamslots for doing so although you'll have more viable options, you'll be forced to use multiple teamslots to do what pdon does in one. Not to mention that if this thread was created solely for the matchup being especially retarded in ubers, I don't see how removing pdon would fix this.
Um... this was about my arguments? I never mentioned matchup in a serious point other than one where I mentioned there was a debatable opinion on one particular aspect of it which means matches are decided by which Primal Groudon set is being ran. In answer to this particular thing, Don checks a lot of things in one team spot, yes, especially the things that would otherwise be used to check the things that it is checking. For every Xerneas, there is a Scizor and a Mawile, for every Kyogre there is a Ferrothorn and Amoongus. It blanket checks a lot of things, and in doing so prevents more creative things that would otherwise do a particular job well from being used as it renders them practically obsolete, if not outright obsolete. In your own words, it compresses far too many things into one teamslot and limits the amont of viable ubers. How is that good? That is most of the reason I consider it bad for the tier.

5)There might be a problem in Oras ubers and banning don may not solve it at all. Its ban might actually lead to a series of other Pokemons being broken(Xerneas,Primal Ogre for example) and may just lead to even more problems in the tier and although this is a slippery slope, it is something you must keep in mind especially when it comes to PR since you haven't given any evidence to show that removing pdon will actually help the tier. Your idea of ladder is cute though and would be useful in theory but ultimately it'd be like the no scald ladder or the ou no mega where the upper end players won't play it since there's really no motivation to.
This is just a slippery slope, as you mentioned. For one thing, the ladder isn't my idea, it was mentioned by Fireburn earlier in this thread. As for the point that I have no evidence for the theorymonning, I was talking to Shrang about that very thing the other day, and I acknowledge that I dont have specific evidence where I can point and say no-Primal Groudon has been done and it is clearly better. If I did, I would have mentioned it and would have made that the driving force of my post, as that would change a fair amount. I would be more in favour of a suspect than an outright ban in case my theorymonning of this is wrong, but between nothing happening and Primal Groudon getting banned, I would prefer the latter option. I do have something somewhat similar, in the PP ORAS Ubers metagame created by other people who really dislike the tier at the moment, which does admittedly ban more than Primal Groudon, however from all the feedback I have received by those taking part, it is a far better and more fun metagame. I cannot say that beyond any reasonable doubt that Primal Groudon is the only reason for this, I am fairly confident that it is a large part of it.

Now I would like to give my own opinion on mence and don but specially on don:
1)Oras Ubers with primal Groudon and MMence is a tier where all styles are viable. From hard Stall to hard HO everything is viable and usable with solid teams. Unlike when Mega Rayquaza was around: Balance and stall were totally unviable so please no comparisons.
For one thing they are not equally viable, considering the record of stall vs HO in official tours is significantly better off for one of them, and it's not for stall. For another, I didn't compare Don to mega-Rayquaza, and didn't mention Mega-Rayquaza in reference to Primal Groudon. The only point I referenced it was when saying that it is evidence that not all Pokemon are considered not too overpowered for ubers. Mega-Rayquaza is worse than Primal Groudon... so? If Primal Groudon deserves to be banned than it should be banned. The only thing I can think that translates this concept into an example is that just because mewtwo was too overpowered in RBY, doesn't mean that Mew didn't deserve to be banned there either.

2)Primal Don Helps all play styles equally. You can use it on stall,balance,BO,HO it will always help you equally.
Responding almost entirely to Lord Outrage here, as you mentioned these were his arguments, if they are not his and are yours I appologise, but in speaking with dear Ragey many times, he has given me the distinct impression he considers it a lot better for offense than he does for stall, serving as the blanket check for so many defensive threats that he doesn't need to care about them with the rest of his offense.

Talking in PM while doing this, he says that Primal Groudon balances itself out. I disagree with this almost entirely, as Offensive (faster) Primal Groudons will beat defensive (slower) primal groudons by knocking them out at +2. If it is meant differently, I think it is more helpful to offense than it is to stall, as is shown by the offensive meta we exist in, which I am not the only one saying.

3)Primal Don has lots of checks that are viable and that serve as checks for other pokemons too.
Example: Latias checks don and ogre and can defog, Giratina O checks groudon and ekiller + Fighting mons and can also defog, Lugia checks both mence and Don etc...
No arguments with this part. It has checks. I didn't say that it didn;t, just that it had very few, causing greater overcentralisation. I do find it somewhat amusing that you mention several Mons which get flattened by mixed primal groudon though.

4)Primal Don lacks any sort of recovery(neither lefties nor recover roost etc) if you land in a toxic on it, it just sinks like the titanic so you could use toxic on ogre for example(helpful vs lati twins 2) and on mons that lures it in usually.
The lack of recovery is a major problem it struggles from, people just need to step up their building a bit instead of complaining all the time. Instead of seeing it as a monster and being stubborn just find ways around it and hit its weak spots.
Aside from being a git gud argument which should never be a valid argument for something not being banworthy, it does get a particular form of recovery known as rest. It is true that it doesn't run it at the moment, however it could do so when partnered alongside something like a CM aromatherepy Xerneas which would completely invalidate the toxic option you yourself mentioned. As for it sinking like the titanic... it still takes about 6 turns for toxic to kill from full on its own, assuming it stays in for 6 straight turns and not switching out to reset the toxic damage.

EDIT: On an amusing historical note, the titanic took just shy of 3 hours to sink from when it started sinking to when it was fully submerged.

5)As I said earlier, Primal Groudon is a soft check to a lot of things. Banning it will make the tier even more mach-up based and even more problems will arise. You will need more team slots to check xerneas and ogre as well the new pokemons that become viable after it's ban so It's ban is really solving nothing.
Aside from the fact that your own argument against my predictions from a Primal-Groudon-less metagame also applies here in that you have no evidence that would suggest this would be the case, it is unhealthy to the progression of the tier as a whole, and something unhealthy should not stay in a tier due to fear of possibly something maybe getting too strong in its absence. Again, assuming I am talking to Lord Outrage as opposed to user Haruno here, you have said you would be in favour of a Primal Groudon + Geomancy ban, why not see if Primal Groudon getting banned has the effect you think it does. If xerneas reaches 73% usage, with 75.5% average usage in the final 6 weeks of SPL, I would argue in favour of it being overpowered too.

Yes primal don is great at what it does. It's good offensively and defensively and puts on rocks reliably. I agree, but it's noway near the juggernaut some players are making it look like and it has many weak spots that a player can exploit while teambuilding and during the game.
You pointed out one. The lack of recovery. Far from "many weak spots".
 
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Minority

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Realize that banning P Don falls in line with OU's tiering policy and thus blurs the line between Ubers and OU. If you start banning for balance and/or to create a more enjoyable tier then Ubers reverts to OU.

The usage argument is bullshit. Lati has 90%+ usage in ADV and that gen is virtually perfect.


tl;dr: [18:01] Dice: mm2 is still a better poster than almost everyone currently in the room
 
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Realize that banning P Don falls in line with OU's tiering policy and thus blurs the line between Ubers and OU. If you start banning for balance and/or to create a more enjoyable tier then Ubers reverts to OU.

The usage argument is bullshit. Lati has 90%+ usage in ADV and that gen is virtually perfect.


tl;dr: [18:01] Dice: mm2 is still a better poster than almost everyone currently in the room
My question is this: what, exactly, is wrong with blurring that line? OU will still be OU and Ubers will still be Ubers. If Ubers is better off with banning for balance, why should the argument of "oh, but Ubers will just be more like ou" stop it from happening?

For the record, I'm legitimately curious (and I'm asking with the assumption that dice's proposal will play no part in this debate.
 

Minority

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The only thing that keeps OU and Ubers separate is banning policy. If you start banning in Ubers according to OU's ban policy then the tiers are the same; all you have done is reintroduced broken threats back to OU. Subsequently, threats are torn down until you are left with what is currently OU. AG now has the same ban list as Ubers prior to this process but with all the uncompetitive garbage like OHKO and Swagger.

It's the same reason why a BL between OU and Ubers would fail. To ban Pokemon from Ubers for the purpose of balancing or creating a more enjoyable tier is introducing broken mons to a tier that seeks to eliminate broken mons. jackm has also written on this topic so read some of his stuff if you are still curious.

The three major problems with this are first, it kills Ubers and makes a bastardized OU that eventually becomes identical to OU. Second, it effectively undoes the AG bans. Third, it wastes everyone's time.
 

Fireburn

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This thread has largely been discussing whether or not Primal Groudon should be banned, which is besides the point. The real question is whether or not the banning philosophy of Ubers should change. Whether or not to ban Primal Groudon will follow what we decide from there.

First, let's establish what Ubers tiering philosophy is as it stands now:

1) Ubers does not care about overcentralization. The top Pokemon of past Uber metagames have routinely hit ~50% usage or more. We currently have a Pokemon that hits 70% usage at the very tippy top of the ladder. We don't care. Hypercentralization does not mean Ubers is unplayable and alone is not a reason to ban something. It's not even necessarily a bad thing.

2) Ubers does not care about balance, and will not ban to preserve metagame balance. This is ultimately because that's OU job. OU is, under our tiering system, the fundamental balanced metagame. Any tier below it is expected to adhere to similar philosophies of balance and reasonable centralization, while any tier above it is by definition overcentralized, with no active concerns for balance. If we started banning things from Ubers for balance reasons, that would ultimately defeat the purpose of OU and call our entire tiering hierarchy into question. Furthermore, an imbalanced metagame does not correlate to one that is unenjoyable (hi DPP Ubers).

3) Ubers will only make bans to preserve a playable competitive metagame. This is why we have retained basic clauses, and have further banned things such as Swagger and Moody. Normally, this does not extend to Pokemon, except for recently with the banning of Mega Rayquaza, as its sheer power gave it zero checks and made all playstyles completely unviable except the offensive teams it found its home on. The concept of "playable" is loose, but it is clear the Mega Rayquaza metagame was not that. Overall, it was an exception to the general rule of "don't ban Pokemon."

That should cover everything that is in practice at this point. Now, if you want to ban Primal Groudon, you either have to:

A) Argue why it should be given a Mega Rayquaza-esque exception to the rule, OR
B) Argue why the current Ubers tiering paradigm needs to be changed to make such a ban permissible.

We can tell pretty quickly that A) isn't going to work:
  • Primal Groudon does not make all teamstyles unviable. While it can be disputed whether or not all teamstyles are equally viable, effective balanced/stall teams do exist. Primal Groudon can also be used effectively on any teamstyle which makes this argument difficult to justify.
  • Primal Groudon is not unstoppable and has checks and weaknesses. It has no counters (most Ubers don't) and it can beat most of its checks with coverage moves/status and the like (most Ubers can), but it does have multiple checks that can do other things outside of checking Primal Groudon. Lugia, Arceus-Ground, Arceus-Water, Lati@s, Mega Salamence, Rayquaza, Giratina-O, defensive Primal Kyogre, Yveltal, SDef Gliscor, regular Groudon, and Ho-Oh (if no Stone Edge) can all check Primal Groudon to varying degrees. This is not a short list and all of these Pokemon are viable in ORAS Ubers. Primal Groudon also lacks recovery of any kind and has an exploitable Ground weakness, which is very much relevant on a Pokemon commonly used as a blanket check to many threats as hazards/Toxic quickly wear it out. It's raw specially defensive stats (100/90), while good, aren't super high either, necessitating significant investment to properly check things such as Xerneas and Primal Kyogre.
  • Banning Primal Groudon alone will more than likely not "fix" ORAS Ubers. I'm well aware of the fact that most people who want Primal Groudon gone also want many other things gone, such as Primal Kyogre, Mega Salamence, Geomancy, Shadow Tag, etc. All the blame thus isn't on Primal Groudon, though it is admittedly the largest contributor towards these ill feelings some people have towards ORAS Ubers. (Small aside: Geomancy and STAG are not on the table and probably never will be). The "slippery slope" of bans that would inevitably be requested is unacceptable under the current paradigm.
So, if you want Primal Groudon banned, you have to argue why we should change the tiering philosophy of Ubers to where such a ban would be allowed, and to what degree we should change it, if we should change it. Bear in mind chaos's initially proposed guidelines were not set in stone (though still useful), and that Ubers is not OU and we will not turn it into such. This discussion is much more a philosophical discussion than a Primal Groudon discussion, which I feel has been obfuscated by the OP being heavily weighted towards requesting a ban as well as the tone of subsequent discussion.

I will conclude by clarifying a few of PoMMan's general arguments that I don't feel are quite correct:
  • Mega Rayquaza's ban should be taken as an exception to the rule and was not, nor was ever intended to be, any precedent for future bans. Banning Primal Groudon is a question of balance which is not at all like the Mega Rayquaza ban. I put this in bold text because many people seem to be confusing this point.
  • Pokemon shift in viability with the introduction of new Pokemon all the time, there is no law that says the same Pokemon have to be viable in every metagame. If Landorus-T and Poison Arceus suck in ORAS Ubers, that's irrelevant, we have no obligation to make them viable. Many Pokemon you listed have become less viable for other reasons than Primal Groudon or are still viable in certain respects (Palkia has to compete with Latis, Kyogre has a very usable Primal forme of its own, Lando-T can't touch Salamence or EKiller, the concept of certain Arceus formes being bad is nothing new, etc.)
  • Primal Groudon checking ONE out of a bunch of setup sweepers after a boost ONCE =/= different power bracket. This is no different than say, Swampert in ADV/DPP.
  • I've said this before, but "unfun" is not a reason to ban a Pokemon. That's way too subjective. All tiering is subjective to a degree, but banning something just because it's "unfun" is unacceptable. What even is "unfun?"
 

MikeDawg

Banned deucer.
Fireburn I don't play ubers, so I can't comment on groudon/etc.

However, I do think that the banning philosophy should be discussed, particularly whther or not uners should care about balance. You said no, because OU already does this. I don't neccesarily agree or disagree with the philosophy itself, but I do have a minor issue with this reasoning.

Ou starts with an arbitrary banlist and goes from there. If OU started as ubers, then OU would ban current ubers mons for balance, and other ubers mons would end up permanently in the tier (ubers mons do a fairly good job of checking ubers mons, so balance would be relatively acheived before the good majority of them are banned. The others would be sent to ubers where there would be no point to test for balance, because that was the responsibility of OU.

In the current system, though, this is not the case. Most of ubers is arbitrarily insta-banned at the start of the generation. Most of the ubers mons never go through the system at all. As such, OU did not check them for balance. Instead, they were arbitrarily banned.

For that reason, I think that banning (to AG) for balance in Ubers is not a bad idea.
 

Inspirited

There is usually higher ground.
is a Contributor Alumnus
Hmm, the way I see this is that no one threat puts Ubers over the edge. Instead, it seems that the quantity of threats that are all of ridiculous strength (the strength isn't the problem, the numbers of these pokemon with this sort of strength is). We are all Ubers players and have learned to adapt and play with very centralizing threats, but when the centralization is spread the way it is over many Pokemon, one team just has a whole lot of trouble trying to do the impossible in preparing for them all. Mega Salamence and Primal Groudon are scapegoated because they are easily the most powerful of these threats, but like Fireburn said, The are very manageable in the metagame in theory. What breaks the theory is the sheer amount of other threats that come with the tier that a team needs to prepare for. Say we remove Geomancy or Xerneas altogether, you could play around with new ways to handle Don and Mence because you don't need a Geoxern check and can use mons that Geoxern would usually like to set up on to check these two. Moves like Rest on Giratina-O would start to appear and faster Steel-types would start to gain popularity and would now have room for EVs and moves to help with Salamence. I realize this example is entirely theory, at this point, but it makes so much sense that I cannot ignore it. It definitely deserves looking into and I will do it myself if necessary.

This is the way I see the "power levels" and where the centralizing cut off is:
*** WARNING: THIS WILL LOOK ALMOST IDENTICLE TO THE VIABILITY RANKINGS THREAD ***
(this is a more accurate list of what I think of when teambuilding)

Tier 0:

- Primal Groudon
- Mega Salamence

Tier 1:
- Xerneas
- Arceus-Ghost
- Arceus
- Ho-Oh
- Primal Kyogre
- Darkrai
- Mewtwo
- Mega Mewtwo Y
- Mega Gengar
- Lugia

=== Arbitrary Centralization Cutoff ===
If you have plans against the above mons and all of their potential viable partners, you will more than likely get donked at team preview by one of these mons bellow or if they are partnered with a centralizing mon above.

Tier 2:
- Latios
- Latias
- Klefki
- Yveltal
- Arceus-Ground
- Deoxys-A
- Deoxys-S
- Arceus-Water
- Mega Sableye
- Dialga
- Mega Mewtwo X
- Excadrill
- Tyranitar
- Giratina-O
- Mega Diancie
- Rayquaza
- Arceus-Rock
- Ferrothorn
- Blissey
- Wobbuffet

Tier 3:
- Arceus-Dark
- Arceus-Fairy
- Kyurem-W
- Palkia
- Mega Kangaskhan
- Mega Lucario
- Ditto
- Genesect
- Arceus-Fighting
- Arceus-Ice
- Mega Metagross
- more that are forgotten about
Keep in mind that none of these Pokemon are game breaking on their own, but when thrown into an environment where they can be paired with the rest of tier 0, 1, and 2, the combinations possible are impossible to prepare for because of just how many centralizing threats and how much diversity there is. Too much diversity among powerful threats is actually very unhealthy for a metagame when being able to prepare for such diversity is left in the dust. The easiest way to "solve" the problem is banning threats of a certain tier, but none of them are powerful enough to warrant a ban is the problem. I am not saying that we should ban a certain power tier, but we should review our tiering policy and adapt because this problem will only grow worse as more Pokemon are created in generations to come.
 
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Level 56

Faded memories
is a Tutor Alumnusis a Tiering Contributor Alumnusis the 6th Grand Slam Winner
Well the main problem in ORAS Ubers is Primal-Groudon but Mega-Salamence is also a mon which only has few checks.

Mega-Salamence is a great threat in the current metagame blessed with great speed + solid bulk + sheer power + great ability. It has access to dragon dance which is the
reason why it is difficult to deal with it. Once it sets up, the amount of damage it does to the opposing team is huge. It can easily set up vs most mons. This replay shows what this point means (
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/ubers-240243746)
It has access to refresh, meaning it can be used as a ho-oh check and paralysis + toxic won't be of much use. This replay shows how threatening it can be (
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/ubers-202070193). Its defensive variant is also cool as it can keep threats like ekiller, SD Groundceus, ho-oh in check, along with this it is a solid defogger. It also has a negative affect on teambuilding.

On the other hand, the real reason why ORAS Ubers is so boring now, is because of Primal-Groudon. The reason is simple:

Primal-Groudon threatens 85% of the stuff in Ubers, thanks to its terrifying stats, movepool and ability. The real reason why Deo-S HO is the most successful team now in ORAS Ubers is due to Primal-Groudon. In XY Ubers, the reason why Deo-S HO wasn't much successful was because there was no Primal-Groudon and in order to check Xerneas in XY, when one was using Deo-S HO, people had to run stuff like thundurus-I. Now, there is no need to run a weak mon like thundurus-I because Primal-Groudon + Ekiller face no problem dealing with Xerneas. Primal-Groudon is the reason why stall teams are not that much viable in the current metagame. Primal-Groudon exerts huge amount of pressure on defoggers. Thunder-Wave is very problematic for defoggers like waterceus, latias etc. (Groundceus is still a nice defogger and switch-in to Primal-Groudon though). SD + Twave Primal-Groudon can pretty much take care of stall teams by itself. This replay shows what this set is capable of (http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-ubers-36671)
The multiple roles it plays in a battle is just tremendous and It heavily affects teambuilding. Primal-Groudon is the reason why only offensive teams are successful. There is absolutely no room for innovations at the moment. There is no creativity in the tier at the moment due to Primal-Groudon. Eleceus, Poisonceus, Gothitelle, Palkia, Scizor, Ferrothorn which were one of the better mons in XY, are useless now.

Overall, i don't think Mega-Salamence is ban worthy, it is a great threat but not in the same class as Primal-Groudon. I think we should try a ladder without Primal-Groudon and see how things work then.
 

Starmei

You thought you could challenge me?
is a Tiering Contributor Alumnus
Personally i find mence more annoying to face than dondons but after speaking to quite a few people my opinion seems to be quite unpopular.
I think we should try a ladder without Primal-Groudon and see how things work then.
If we do that then it'll just make things like Primal Ogre unstoppable gods. Especially if you pair it with Pursuit. I'm opposed to a PDon-free ladder and I think that it'll just spark up more shit between a bunch of players who want Primal Dondons outta the way

If a ladder was to ban both Primal dondons and Ogre (and maybe Mence but that's another thing) I'd be in favour of giving it a go though, no harm in trying
 
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AM

is a Community Leader Alumnusis a Community Contributor Alumnusis a Tiering Contributor Alumnusis a Contributor Alumnusis a Battle Simulator Moderator Alumnusis a Past WCoP Champion
LCPL Champion
Fireburn this is a response from brokenwings that I'm conveying here because he doesn't have PR access due to not being a badgeholder. Most Ubers players may know who he is, some may not. Regardless that isn't the concern but thought I would preface by establishing he's pretty in tune with the Ubers meta for awhile now and on his behalf would like to share his response.
This thread has largely been discussing whether or not Primal Groudon should be banned, which is besides the point. The real question is whether or not the banning philosophy of Ubers should change. Whether or not to ban Primal Groudon will follow what we decide from there.


First, let's establish what Ubers tiering philosophy is as it stands now:


1) Ubers does not care about overcentralization. The top Pokemon of past Uber metagames have routinely hit ~50% usage or more. We currently have a Pokemon that hits 70% usage at the very tippy top of the ladder. We don't care. Hypercentralization does not mean Ubers is unplayable and alone is not a reason to ban something. It's not even necessarily a bad thing.
No argument here.
2) Ubers does not care about balance, and will not ban to preserve metagame balance. This is ultimately because that's OU job. OU is, under our tiering system, the fundamental balanced metagame. Any tier below it is expected to adhere to similar philosophies of balance and reasonable centralization, while any tier above it is by definition overcentralized, with no active concerns for balance. If we started banning things from Ubers for balance reasons, that would ultimately defeat the purpose of OU and call our entire tiering hierarchy into question. Furthermore, an imbalanced metagame does not correlate to one that is unenjoyable (hi DPP Ubers).
This definition seems outdated with the advent of the anything goes tier. I’ll get to this later though.

Replying to last sentence- For one, this is completely subjective, and for a lot of people it absolutely does (depending on the degree of imbalance ofc.) If it didn’t then this thread wouldn’t exist, and you wouldn’t be hearing nearly as much complaining to do something about it. I don’t know a ton about DPP Ubers but it seems ridiculous to compare the balance of ORAS Ubers to DPP. No mons in DPP skew the meta or accomplish as much with a single free turn as much as Mega Mence or Primal Groudon (or GeoXern lol.)
3) Ubers will only make bans to preserve a playable competitive metagame. This is why we have retained basic clauses, and have further banned things such as Swagger and Moody. Normally, this does not extend to Pokemon, except for recently with the banning of Mega Rayquaza, as its sheer power gave it zero checks and made all playstyles completely unviable except the offensive teams it found its home on. The concept of "playable" is loose, but it is clear the Mega Rayquaza metagame was not that. Overall, it was an exception to the general rule of "don't ban Pokemon."
Alright, this is the part of your post that I have the most issues with. How was the Rayquaza meta any less “playable” than it is now? You said it yourself, “unplayable” is as loose a term as “unfun” is, and the metagame was most certainly playable with Rayquaza in it in a literal sense of the word. Was it even REMOTELY enjoyable or interesting to play? Absolutely not, but it WAS playable. How is that so different from the case here? I would argue that Mega Mence is VERY comparable to Rayquaza, it trades some weaknesses, some outright offensive power, priority, and the possibility to hold an item for reliable recovery, insane physical bulk, and a reliable way of removing status (albeit at the cost of coverage, like it matters when Double-Edge practically 2HKOs the entire tier unboosted.) I would dare say that the metagame right now is NOT “playable” (not literally, but in the same way the Ray meta was unplayable) for myself, and going off of a lot of the general opinions I’ve seen from both the userbase and in this thread, other people too- if this wasn’t the case then this thread and the Ubers Community thread probably wouldn’t exist, and you probably wouldn’t be so frequently bugged by people to do something about it.

Going to go off on a bit of a tangent here to all the people using the “get creative” argument- When the most consistent team in tournaments by a decent margin has been the Deo-S sample team, what’s the point of trying to innovate? It completely kills my motivation and interest to play this tier when I see basically the exact same 5-6 mons in literally every other game I play or watch. I can’t blame my opponents for not being creative, why would I? They want to win and it’s proven to be probably the most consistent build at a high level of play. Other archetypes are viable, sure, but for the most part they are pigeon-holed into running the same mons, which results in every team looking more or less the same if they want to be even remotely consistent. (Think Sableye + Lugia + etc for stall, PDon + Keys + Lati@s for Balance, etc..) Sure you can try to be “creative” but it’s simply not worth it because most of the time you will end up with a team that is very matchup-based and inconsistent and usually falls flat on its face vs the standard Deo-S HO team, let alone trying to contend with the myriad of lower ranked threats and other playstyles in the tier. I’m not going to pretend like I know very much about pre- sixth gen Ubers tiers, but I can say with complete certainty that in XY this issue wasn’t nearly as extreme as it is now, and sadly will only get worse with each new generation of Pokemon games.
That should cover everything that is in practice at this point. Now, if you want to ban Primal Groudon, you either have to:


A) Argue why it should be given a Mega Rayquaza-esque exception to the rule, OR

B) Argue why the current Ubers tiering paradigm needs to be changed to make such a ban permissible.


We can tell pretty quickly that A) isn't going to work:

  • Primal Groudon does not make all teamstyles unviable. While it can be disputed whether or not all teamstyles are equally viable, effective balanced/stall teams do exist. Primal Groudon can also be used effectively on any teamstyle which makes this argument difficult to justify.
By itself, maybe not. But when a lot of games are simply being decided on which PDon and Mega Mence sets you or your opponent is running, how is this not a problem when this tier is included in major tournaments and supposed to be competitive? Also, Wreckdra made a good point; it’s almost impossible to consistently check the combination of PDon + Mence while still dealing with the other prominent and less prominent threats in the tier with 6 teamslots, due to the very small pool of mons that actually checks those main 2 (and how shaky most of these supposed “checks” actually are; I’ll be getting into that in the next segment though.)
Primal Groudon is not unstoppable and has checks and weaknesses. It has no counters (most Ubers don't) and it can beat most of its checks with coverage moves/status and the like (most Ubers can), but it does have multiple checks that can do other things outside of checking Primal Groudon. Lugia, Arceus-Ground, Arceus-Water, Lati@s, Mega Salamence, Rayquaza, Giratina-O, defensive Primal Kyogre, Yveltal, SDef Gliscor, regular Groudon, and Ho-Oh (if no Stone Edge) can all check Primal Groudon to varying degrees. This is not a short list and all of these Pokemon are viable in ORAS Ubers. Primal Groudon also lacks recovery of any kind and has an exploitable Ground weakness, which is very much relevant on a Pokemon commonly used as a blanket check to many threats as hazards/Toxic quickly wear it out. It's raw specially defensive stats (100/90), while good, aren't super high either, necessitating significant investment to properly check things such as Xerneas and Primal Kyogre.
OK half of these mons you listed are incredibly shaky at best, or just downright impractical as checks. I will break down some of these.

Lugia - Sure, this is one of the best checks to Groudon. Too bad it despises status, falls flat on its face with Stealth Rock on the field, and can’t do anything but toxic or phase out Groudon. Lugia only really fits on stall teams and requires full support from its team in order to check Groudon and Mence (Usually a magic bounce + secondary hazard remover.) Lugia could also “check” Mega Rayquaza with this much support so why is it acceptable for Groudon and Mence to stay while Rayquaza isn’t?

Arceus-Ground - Another fairly solid check. Too bad it hates switching into fire moves/burns and isn’t exactly the kind of mon you’d want to fit on every team, yet you’re kinda forced to a lot of the time because it’s the only defogger that can consistently beat PDon without risking paralysis.

…. and that’s where the list of “solid” checks ends. Let’s look into the rest of these checks just for arguments sake.

Arceus-Water - Can’t do anything but Toxic PDon or defog its rocks away, completely helpless vs swords dance, PP stalled by Rest sets (which is viable on stall, don’t know why people would think otherwise) and can quite easily lose to timely paras from the support set. Usually has to sack itself while risking full paras in order to try to keep rocks off the field, which is obviously less than ideal since you want this mon to be able to check things like Mega Mence and Ho-oh as well, 2 other mons who are ridiculously hard to deal with, Ho-oh obviously isn’t even on the same league as Mence and PDon though.

Rayquaza - Decent offensive check, can’t even remotely switch in, easily worn down, and has to severely limit its coverage by running a water move… This is also pretty obvious most of the time and the Groudon user will just switch out, and God forbid that Groudon gets a free turn to set up Rock Polish before you get to go to your Rayquaza. I still won’t deny that this is one of the better offensive checks though, albeit obviously overspecialized.

Giratina-O - Switching this in is incredibly risky due to how easily this mon is worn down. If the opponent’s PDon happens to have dragon coverage or goes for a status move that turn then good luck checking PDon or anything else later in the game. Really shitty and inconsistent check if I’m being frank.

Lati@s - See the above, you have to hope your opponent isn’t running a dragon move. Also has a very difficult time doing anything else in the game if it takes a para, while Latias can’t even KO offensive PDon from full, which is a problem if it sets up a SD/Rock Polish as you switch in expecting the rocks set. Really shitty and inconsistent check if I’m being frank.

SDef Gliscor - This is a joke right? Have fun switching into any fire move besides Lava Plume or accomplishing ANYTHING worthwhile against literally any other mon in the tier.

Regular Groudon - Pretty decent check if it runs a Lum berry, too bad the opportunity cost of not using PDon is gigantic and not worth it on most teambuilds. Also has no recovery, hates mixed sets, blah blah

Ho-oh - lol

Notice how most of these mons just flat out lose if your opponent happens to bring the right PDon set? And the thing is, ALL of these different PDon sets are viable and potentially worth using. I feel like this mon is a big reason most battles in ORAS Ubers are decided in the teambuilder. How many times have you seen someone bring 2-3 of these “checks” to PDon / Mence and still lose to them?
Banning Primal Groudon alone will more than likely not "fix" ORAS Ubers. I'm well aware of the fact that most people who want Primal Groudon gone also want many other things gone, such as Primal Kyogre, Mega Salamence, Geomancy, Shadow Tag, etc. All the blame thus isn't on Primal Groudon, though it is admittedly the largest contributor towards these ill feelings some people have towards ORAS Ubers. (Small aside: Geomancy and STAG are not on the table and probably never will be). The "slippery slope" of bans that would inevitably be requested is unacceptable under the current paradigm.
I agree, personally I think that if PDon were banned then Primal Ogre would lose its most splashable check and likely become almost unstoppable, especially with Pursuit support. I can’t say with certainty though ofc. I do think that a suspect or test ladder without Mega Mence and Primals would go a long way in improving the tier and satisfying the people who aren’t happy with the tier in its current state though… Not to mention I really don’t see any downsides to this, at best we end up with an objectively better tier and at worst, everyone shuts up about banning the Primals and Mence. The irony here is that saying there would be a “slippery slope” demand for other bans is in itself a slippery slope argument, since there is no way to know how it will turn out without actually doing it.
So, if you want Primal Groudon banned, you have to argue why we should change the tiering philosophy of Ubers to where such a ban would be allowed, and to what degree we should change it, if we should change it. Bear in mind chaos's initially proposed guidelines were not set in stone (though still useful), and that Ubers is not OU and we will not turn it into such. This discussion is much more a philosophical discussion than a Primal Groudon discussion, which I feel has been obfuscated by the OP being heavily weighted towards requesting a ban as well as the tone of subsequent discussion.


I will conclude by clarifying a few of PoMMan's general arguments that I don't feel are quite correct:
I don’t agree with all of PoMMan’s points myself but I find some of the things here kind of questionable and somewhat contradictory.
Mega Rayquaza's ban should be taken as an exception to the rule and was not, nor was ever intended to be, any precident for future bans.Banning Primal Groudon is a question of balance which is not at all like the Mega Rayquaza ban. I put this in bold text because many people seem to be confusing this point.
Rayquaza’s ban certainly seemed like a question of balance, I don’t see why that’s so hard to admit? It was incredibly imbalanced and made the tier absolute shit, and it was banned. There’s confusion here because no matter how you want to phrase it, it was obviously a ban for balance’s sake. It’s pretty obvious from the responses in this thread and the Ubers Community thread that most people would prefer a balanced tier to an imbalanced one.. What is the problem with this? Times have changed and you have to keep in mind that Gamefreak doesn’t even take us into consideration when making new games, let alone actually trying to balance these mons themselves. This is the benefit of being our own community disconnected from Nintendo/Gamefreak.
Pokemon shift in viability with the introduction of new Pokemon all the time, there is no law that says the same Pokemon have to be viable in every metagame. If Landorus-T and Poison Arceus suck in ORAS Ubers, that's irrelevant, we have no obligation to make them viable. Many Pokemon you listed have become less viable for other reasons than Primal Groudon or are still viable in certain respects (Palkia has to compete with Latis, Kyogre has a very usable Primal forme of its own, Lando-T can't touch Salamence or EKiller, the concept of certain Arceus formes being bad is nothing new, etc.)
No argument here.
Primal Groudon checking ONE out of a bunch of setup sweepers after a boost ONCE =/= different power bracket. This is no different than say, Swampert in ADV/DPP.
No argument here. I agree that this would be a very silly reason to ban a mon from any tier, let alone Ubers, if this was the only factor being taken into account.
I've said this before, but "unfun" is not a reason to ban a Pokemon. That's way too subjective. All tiering is subjective to a degree, but banning something just because it's "unfun" is unacceptable. What even is "unfun?"
I agree with your main point here, but the problem is, “unplayable” is just as subjective as “unfun”. Some people found the Rayquaza metagame completely playable and fun, yet it was still banned for being a horrendously broken piece of shit, regardless of how you want to phrase it. It seems like you just don’t want to admit that this was a ban for balance’s sake, which if that is the case, then this tier has already applied OU banning philosophy in some way, which contradicts with some of the points you have made earlier in your post. If not, then why not just unban Mega Rayquaza to keep the Ubers tiering philosophy and logic behind it consistent? Otherwise, what was the point of splitting Ubers and Anything Goes? At the very least it seems like we need to establish more definitive and objective criterion for banning a mon to Anything Goes.

For what it’s worth, this post isn’t meant to attack you or the way you’re deciding to run your tier in any way. I realize it’s impossible to please everyone. At the same time, it just seems wrong to ignore a problem and pretend nothing is wrong when it’s clear a lot of your playerbase thinks otherwise. I hope you’ll take some of this into consideration, thanks for reading. - Brokenwings
 
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